Here is a quote from the November 27, 2000 Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, from the article 'The Second Wave of Japanese Desktop Publishing':
I'm looking for a problem to which all of these engineering solutions are
being proposed and discussed. I don't yet see anything that needs to be
solved. I see a theoretically chaotic situation, not an actually chaotic
situation.
Gaiji are Kanji characters outside the current JIS and Unicode encoding sets and are not included in a standard font. They comprise many "unofficial" Kanji characters, mistakes and misinterpretations, and seldom-used Kanji passed down for generations, long before printing presses and governments created standards. These Gaiji characters are widely used in people- and place-names. To this day, they are a reason for publishers to hang on to their proprietary systems.I personally don't know enough about Japanese to say if this is indeed a character collection problem, or only a glyph variant problem; I suspect it is a combination of both.
Like many on this list, I am entirely of the opinion that every character is either currently in Unicode or on the way for a feature version. However good the process may be to add characters, it still remains that there is a lag and something has to be done in the meantime; until three weeks ago, there were about 40,000 characters I may have a need for, and my only Unicode-compatible solution was to use the PUA. Until Unicode 3.2 is out, there are characters in JIS X 0213:2000 which are not in Unicode. And all the descriptions of Gaiji I have heard suggest that there are characters that will not make it for a long time.
In other words, for a Japanese publisher, it seems that the PUA is something you have to use every day, in almost every document. Would that qualify for your search?
Eric.
